\n<\/p>\n
Losses at Sotheby\u2019s auction house more than doubled last year, as the company owned by billionaire Patrick Drahi suffered from a continued slump in the art market and high severance costs.<\/p>\n
Filings from its parent company, Bidfair Luxembourg, showed losses widened significantly to $248m (\u00a3184m) over the 12 months to 2024, after losses of $106m a year earlier.<\/p>\n
Revenues from commissions and fees tumbled by 18% to $813m in 2024, as Sotheby\u2019s felt the pinch of a drop in demand. It follows a fall in spending by wealthy collectors amid growing geopolitical and trade tensions in recent years.<\/p>\n
Sotheby\u2019s also took a hit from hefty payouts for what appeared to be the departure of just a handful of staff. Severance costs last year jumped to $29.2m, compared with $11.4m in 2023, despite its headcount only dropping by 24 employees to 2,218, according to findings first reported by the Financial Times.<\/p>\n
The company, which operates in 40 countries, was founded as a rare book dealer in 1744 by London bookseller Samuel Baker and did not enter the world of fine arts until the early 20th century, opening an office in New York in 1955 as the US market became increasingly important.<\/p>\n
As well as auctions of art and books, it has expanded into areas including wine, diamonds and also a financial services arm that funds art deals and makes loans secured against collections.<\/p>\n
Sotheby\u2019s was later snapped up by Drahi, who took the company private in a \u00a33.7bn deal in 2019. The French-Israeli businessman, a keen art collector, has since struck a deal with Abu Dhabi\u2019s third-biggest sovereign wealth fund, ADQ, to help raise about $1bn for the company\u2019s turnaround, in exchange for a 24% stake.<\/p>\n
While Drahi has come to greater public prominence through his interest in the art world, the bulk of his wealth derives from his founding of the Amsterdam-listed telecoms firm Altice, which he built up via a string of acquisitions of smaller companies.<\/p>\n
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Sign up to Business Today<\/span><\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Altice previously held a 24.5% stake in the UK\u2019s BT\u2019s group, but sold off its shareholding to Indian conglomerate Bharti Enterprises last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Losses at Sotheby\u2019s auction house more than doubled last year, as the company owned by billionaire Patrick Drahi suffered from a continued slump in the art market and high severance costs. Filings from its parent company, Bidfair Luxembourg, showed losses widened significantly to $248m (\u00a3184m) over the 12 months to 2024, after losses of $106m<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[12747,3153,1389,9982,306,12748,12746],"class_list":{"0":"post-20746","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-248m","9":"tag-art","10":"tag-double","11":"tag-losses","12":"tag-market","13":"tag-slumps","14":"tag-sothebys"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}